As Muffet’s nerves calmed, her hands were steadier. Stewart’s muscle memory mapped onto her nervous system, each movement deliberate as she laid out her scavenged resources across the stone slab. Glass vials were arranged by capacity. The metal tools were lined up edge to edge, and the fungus packets were flattened for visibility. She tore a strip of synth-fabric from her robe and wove it through the slats of a rusted wire mesh. She improvised a filter like a combat medic prepping a field dressing.

  The UI pulsed at the periphery incessantly.

  NEW RECIPES AVAILABLE

  - CRAFT POTION

  - ASSEMBLE TRAP

  - [Locked: Advanced Synthesis]

  Dismissed with a blink, the menu faded, leaving only a faint shimmer as a reminder. Muffet ignored it and got to work.

  First, protein extraction. Muffet knelt by the river’s edge, jammed a jar into the flow, and scooped up the richest, cloudiest fraction—milk runoff, heavy with curds and microbial life. The fluid sloshed viscously, resisting every tilt as if it resented containment. Muffet jammed the robe-filter over a second jar and poured the whey through, squeezing the cloth between knuckles until a dense, glutinous plug formed in the mesh.

  Stewart’s voice, in the part of her mind that hadn’t fully merged, offered quiet pointers: “Keep the fibers aligned for better throughput. Use a downward spiral to avoid airlocks. Minimize splash radius—contaminants could aerosolize.”

  She followed the tips, each one reducing error. By the end of the run, the filter held a damp, lumpy puck—pure curd, white and granular, trailing strings of solute that made her think of nerves plucked from fresh meat. She packed the curd into a waxed-paper cone and set it aside.

  Step two: fungal reagent. She selected the most promising sample—a wedge of silver-veined fungus with lamellae fine as cigarette paper—and dropped it into a mortar repurposed from a broken mug. Stewart had her scan the perimeter again before proceeding. Still, nothing moved except the distant shimmer of dust motes in the manufactured twilight.

  She rolled a smooth river stone over the fungus, crushing it slowly. The gills gave way with a high-pitched squeak, exuding a metallic, almost ionized scent. She added a pinch of fine ash scraped from the underside of a scorched tuffet, the mineral catalyst sparking small blue flashes as it hit the wet matter. With each grind, the mass darkened, coalescing into a slurry that smoked and then cooled.

  “Consistency’s off,” Stewart cautioned. “Needs less binder.” Muffet scooped out a half-palmful of the excess, then ground again. The result was a paste, viscous but mobile, with a surface sheen like wet silver.

  “Better,” Stewart said.

  A wave of gratification or relief overcame Muffet; she couldn’t tell.

  She decanted the mixture into an empty vial, careful to avoid air bubbles. When the meniscus reached the neck, she thumbed a cork into place and sealed it with a twist of waxed thread. The UI reappeared:

  POTION CRAFTED: Mycelial Coagulant

  EFFECT: Throws off fast-setting webs on contact with air. Instantly immobilizes organic threats. Handle with caution.

  She placed the vial on the ledge, rotated it twice for luck, and wiped her hands on the robe.

  Next, the trap. Muffet sifted through the leftover curd, seeking pieces brittle enough to snap cleanly. She pressed three slabs together, then lashed them with hair-thin filaments stripped from her own robe hem. With the point of a bent needle, she bored a channel into the center and packed it with a line of the silver fungus. She rigged a simple tension trigger using the metal clasp from one of the potion bottles, then baited the trap with a droplet of enzyme-lure: a byproduct she’d scraped from the curd’s runoff.

  All the while, Stewart critiqued silently: “Wider base for stability. Stagger the lures so they can’t be disarmed in one motion. Use the river current to mask the scent.”

  Muffet adjusted each instruction, losing track of whether it was Stewart’s mind or her own that knew these tricks. The hands moved faster with each pass, gaining confidence as the pieces fit together with the inevitability of practiced skill.

  She finished the assembly, then tested it on a clump of drifting mycelium. The lure’s scent was overpowering—almost sweet, with a sharp afterburn. Within seconds, a cluster of small, shelled larvae wriggled up from the silt to feed. Muffet watched, holding her breath as the first larva gnawed at the bait. The trap snapped shut, webbing erupting outward in a tight spiral, pinning the larvae together in a writhing bundle.

  The UI blinked approval:

  TRAP SUCCESSFUL

  RESOURCE YIELD: 3x Protein Nodules, 1x Larval Enzyme Capsule

  She harvested the catch, picking through the trembling netting with tweezers until only the clean prize remained. The larvae were a bit smaller than expected, but Muffet didn’t care. Success was success.

  Stewart’s voice was silent now, replaced by a deep, chest-humming satisfaction. This, finally, was something he remembered how to do: preparation, execution, results. It didn’t matter if the war was against bugs or hunger or memories; the rhythm was the same.

  Muffet laid out the new resources in an array, then took stock. She had food, chemical defenses, and a field-tested trap—more than enough to move forward. But she lingered, cleaning the workstation and cataloging each item as if expecting an inspection.

  For a moment, she thought of the old laboratory in her exile memories: how she’d stayed up nights sorting beakers and test tubes long after the work was done, searching for some order in a world built on chaos. The same hunger for control now as then.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  She sealed the vials, cinched them at her belt, and wiped the river-stone clean before tucking it into her sleeve. Every motion is slow and deliberate, bordering on ritual.

  Muffet/Norris stood, checked the horizon, and nodded once to herself. The next step was obvious: descend into the basin, scout the deeper ruins, and test the webbing potion on anything larger than a handful of larvae.

  As she packed up, a wisp of memory surfaced. Not the pain of exile or the shame of her past, but a sharper, brighter recollection: the first time she’d made something that actually worked, watched it do what it was meant to, and felt—if only for a second—like she wasn’t a failure.

  The sensation lingered as she left the ledge, every step anchored by the weight of her new arsenal. Stewart’s presence in her mind was a background hum, watchful but content.

  Ahead, the basin beckoned—darker, deeper, and full of opportunity.

  She would not let it go to waste.

  #

  The descent from the ledge was routine at first. Stewart/Norris moved with a careful, measured cadence—down switching from threat assessment to resource preservation, every muscle acting as if it still had a tour’s worth of miles to cover. The basin below churned with eddies of whey and oil, its surface crusted over in places with microbial mats that looked, from a distance, almost like scabbed skin.

  Muffet had nearly reached the basin’s lip when the world lurched. Not a subtle shiver—no gentle hint of oncoming seismic activity—but a single, bone-deep jolt that set her teeth vibrating and nearly buckled her at the knees.

  Stewart’s tactical scan went haywire. Peripheral vision ghosted, the UI overlay fragmenting as it tried to reconcile real-time motion with the internal map. “Ground movement,” Stewart tried to log, but Muffet’s hands were already gripping the ledge, knuckles bloodless.

  The whey rivers convulsed, wavelets rolling upstream and sending loose debris down in miniature landslides. From every fungal outcrop, clouds of fine spores erupted, turning the half-light into a blizzard of gray. The air filled with a stench sharp enough to cut—a tang of ammonia, old yeast, and the coppery undernote of something living and huge.

  The interface flashed new alerts:

  WARNING: UNKNOWN PRESENCE DETECTED

  FEAR RESPONSE: CRITICAL

  The fear bar in Muffet’s vision swelled from a steady orange to blood red. Peripheral indicators spun out, cycling through warnings she didn’t have time to read. Her body reacted with a speed that belonged to neither her nor Stewart—a fight-or-flight spike that locked her joints and snapped the world to tunnel vision.

  Her pulse hammered so hard in her throat it drowned out the tremor’s aftershocks. She felt her bladder seize, legs trying to fold as every evolutionary instinct screamed that she was prey. The only thing keeping her upright was the ghost-memory of how to survive panic.

  Stewart’s voice, usually distant and clinical, broke through:

  “In four. Hold. Out of four. Again.”

  Muffet tried to inhale, found her mouth dry as lint, then managed a ragged pull of air. She held, chest tight, counting the seconds. Exhaled slowly. Repeat. The red haze at the edge of vision thinned, then thickened again as the tremor redoubled, shaking down a rain of fungus and grit onto her head and shoulders.

  “In four. Hold out of four. You’re not dying. Stay vertical.”

  Her hands wouldn’t unclench from the ledge. She tried to flex the fingers, but they were locked in a death grip, nails digging into the soft stone. Above, the spores danced and fell in a perfect simulation of battlefield smoke.

  Muffet forced another inhale. Stewart narrated each second:

  “In. Hold. Out. You’re still here. Count with me.”

  She counted, voice a papery rasp:

  “One. Two. Three. four. Hold.”

  The air stilled. The tremor faded, leaving only the echo of panic. The interface dialed back a shade, the fear bar receding to a manageable yellow.

  “Good,” said Stewart. “Again.”

  Muffet obeyed, breath by breath, until her vision cleared and the shaking in her legs slowed from earthquake to simple exhaustion.

  She let go of the ledge. The hands left imprints, palms slick with sweat and residue from the stone. She wiped them on the robe and glanced around, daring the world to move again.

  It didn’t. The only motion was the slow settling of spores onto the ruined landscape, each mote falling in lazy, hypnotic arcs.

  The UI overlay pinged, then recalibrated itself:

  FEAR RESISTANCE UNLOCKED: Steady Nerves

  EFFECT: Reduces fear buildup by 10%

  Muffet let herself grin—just a twitch, but real. Stewart, in the mind’s background, radiated a sour pride.

  She checked her gear. All vials intact, traps secured, nothing lost in the tremor. She dusted off her arms, then risked a look over the basin’s rim.

  Below, the whey rivers pooled into a central lake. Across its surface, large, floating platforms drifted like islands—each one bristling with fungus, rusted rebar, and scraps of synthetic material. At the far side, barely visible through the haze, something enormous cast a webwork of shadow over the ground. It moved, but not in any way that made sense to Muffet’s eyes—segment by segment, as if dozens of creatures shared the same skeleton.

  She realized with a jolt that this was what had triggered the warning. The Unknown Presence wasn’t just another bug or system quirk. It was the Spider. Not the cartoon monster of the rhyme, but something engineered to stalk, observe, and—eventually—consume.

  The fear bar flickered, but Muffet tamped it down, the new “Steady Nerves” trait doing its part.

  “Recon first,” Stewart suggested, and Muffet agreed, moving laterally along the ridge to a better vantage point. Every step was less about escape and more about mapping the threat. She made notes—pathways across the floating platforms, entry and exit points, where the Spider’s shadow thickened and where it thinned.

  She catalogued it all, then retreated to a safe alcove, settling in to plan.

  The echo of the tremor lingered in her bones, but the next time the world shook, she knew she would be ready.

  She had survived the first encounter. She could survive the next.

  At the edge of the basin, Muffet clutched her arsenal, stared out over the field of ruined islands, and let herself imagine—just for a moment—what it might feel like to win.

  For now, she would settle for staying alive.